This past week, I fell ill. The heat wave here in Germany made it very hard for me to sleep, and honestly I'm not used to sweating so much when indoors. What this meant was that I had to spend a lot of the week focusing on my recovery. My supervisor was on vacation, so although I didn't like being sick, this was probably a better time to fall sick than when he's in town.

That being said, I unfortunately still didn't have access to data for much of this week, and near the end of the week I found myself in a situation where my supervisor wasn't in town, I'd been sick for the last few days, and I didn't really feel motivated to start working again because after several weeks I was still having to do relatively boring tasks rather than something interesting like data analysis. For much of my time here, I've found these 'relatively boring' coding tasks, where I'm improving an ambulance simulator, annoying because I always felt like I was spending too long doing them. But this week, after taking some time off to get better, I realized how important it was to be forgiving to myself. So, on my last sick day, I spent the second half of the day easing myself back into writing simulator code. While I could have just waited for the next day to resume working, just that gentle push helped me a lot the next morning.

I've realized this week that integrity isn't just about doing the right things when nobody is watching. It's also about setting yourself up for success when you are down, to make it easy for yourself to embody your core principles. Because of my newfound perspective on integrity, which led me to put in the work at the end of last week, I was able to start this week by informally interviewing some of the German Red Cross staff about real-world considerations of ambulance dispatching, using questions that I outlined on that very same sick day.